The bit about needing to punish him extra specifically because he dared question the law also came up in his initial sentencing. It's impressively disgusting, and guess what, most of your neighbors approve.

The first part of the opinion is the Catch 22 appellate stuff that I love so much.

"We find that everything favorable to the defense or harmful to the government's case that the trial judge excluded was completely in the judge's discretion. Even if it was wrong to exclude, it doesn't matter because the defendant was obviously guilty and our magic ball says the jury wouldn't have cared about all that evidence."

Dangerman wrote:So I spent an hour diving in, and yeah, I can't find anything solid to justify why I thought the murder charge was so certain. Guess I'll retract that.

Shit's fucked. If DPR is only guilty of drug law violations, a life sentence is an abomination.

A life sentence for running a website. Code monkeys beware, I guess.

Yeah but how can you tell at a glance which junk a raccoon is packing? Also, gay raccoons? - Hugh Akston
Nothing you can say is as important as the existence of a functioning marketplace of ideas, go set yourself on fire. - JasonL

It seems to me that there should be some sort of redress for cases that are clearly meant to make an example of someone, which violates the essential basic concept of equal treatment under the law. This ruling is completely outrageous, and a good example of why the Democrats lost my vote permanently after '92:

wikipedia wrote:Gerard Edmund Lynch... after previously having been appointed in 2000 by President Bill Clinton to serve on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Judge Lynch was the first appeals-court judge nominated by President Barack Obama to win confirmation from the United States Senate.

Judge Evil wrote:n this case, a reminder of the consequences of facilitating such transactions was perhaps more necessary, particularly because Ulbricht claimed that his site actually made the drug trade safer, and he appeared to contest the legitimacy of the laws he violated.

I realize judges have a lot of discretion over what gets said at trial, but how the fuck is this not 1A protected political speech.

"No federal judge needs to be reminded of the tragic consequences of the traffic in dangerous substances on the lives of users and addicts, or of the risks of overdose and other ramifications of the most dangerous of illegal drugs," Lynch wrote, implying that Judge Forrest could just presume that Silk Road's existence had lots of horrible collateral damage for which Ulbricht should be rightly punished.

And this is a danger to democracy. Get more punishment because someone *thinks* you might have committed another crime. That's just completely unmoored from jurisprudence (not to mention common sense). Not that this doesn't happen on occasion, I'm sure, but I guess now it's official.

And the smear-frame up for the murder-for-hire looks so ham handed it just makes me think the government doesn't think it has to even try anymore.

"Never forget: a war on undocumented immigrants by necessity is a war on all of our freedoms of association and movement."

dead_elvis wrote:It seems to me that there should be some sort of redress for cases that are clearly meant to make an example of someone, which violates the essential basic concept of equal treatment under the law.

How about "cruel and unusual"?

There is a method of redress because I recall a while ago a judge lost a nomination of higher office because he had reduced the sentence of someone convicted of a hate crime to match that of his codefendents.

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